Kelcey Caulder, 21, was born in Lumberton, North Carolina, but moved to Georgia at age 10. In Lumberton, she grew up in her grandmother’s house near the beach, and spent a lot of time on the sand and in the surf. She still considers her grandmother’s house to be “home” and makes an effort to visit as often as she can.
Despite her love of the beach and Tar Heels basketball, Kelcey made the decision not to move back to North Carolina following high school. Instead, she opted to attend Reinhardt University, a small private college in the Canton area, where she hoped to obtain a degree in Public Relations. It was at Reinhardt that Kelcey’s love for journalism was found and fostered into something all-consuming. She joined the college’s student newspaper, The Hiltonian, and spent many late nights fighting with her best friend and co-editor, Meagan Hurley, about which stories should run on A1. During her sophomore year, Kelcey decided that while she loved Reinhardt and the community, she was not getting the best preparation for her career. The college only offered two courses in Journalism and she was no longer satisfied with the idea of getting a PR degree. So, with the hope of learning from and among the best and brightest, Kelcey transferred to the University of Georgia. Now, she hopes to have a career in digital or print political reporting.
Kelcey spent the majority of this past summer on Baxter Street in Athens, working for The Red & Black as the newspaper’s Digital Producer. When she wasn’t busy embedding tweets and creating visually appealing online pieces, however, she did manage to take a mini-vacation to New York City to visit one of her oldest and closest friends, Cameron Stewart. The two romped about the city, enjoying deliciously intoxicating desserts at TipsyScoop, an ice cream shop on Park Avenue that specializes in alcoholic yummies during the day and watching Broadway shows in the evenings. One of her favorite memories of this trip was having the opportunity to meet (re: stalk) Lin-Manuel Miranda outside of the Richard Rodgers Theatre. He signed her copy of the Hamilton soundtrack and thanked her for her over-the-top fangirling. Unfortunately, he was not so impressed as to provide tickets for the show.
When conducting interviews, Kelcey prefers to use a recorder. This ensures that she can report her subjects’ words exactly as they spoke them, and the audio from these interviews can, with permission from subjects, be used to create interesting audio elements for stories.
Kelcey’s favorite written works to date were several pieces that she wrote during her time as an intern at the Student Press Law Center in Washington, DC. These pieces are some of her favorites because they allowed her to mix advocacy and journalism to help ensure that student voices continue to be heard across the nation.
As a journalist, Kelcey firmly believes that reading well leads to writing well. Her favorite book is a popular classic among millennials: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling, her favorite author. She adores this book because she feels as though she grew up alongside the characters and because it, more so than any of the other installments in the Potter series, is the most interesting and action-packed. In her opinion, the stories included in this and the other books in the series are good reads because they teach useful and inspiring lessons about friendship, bravery and the dangers of discrimination. Kelcey admires Rowling’s other works for similar reasons and admires her as a person because of her advocacy for institutionalized children.
The most meaningful advice that Kelcey has ever received she was given to her by her mentor and and high school dance team coach, Melinda Kinsey. Melinda instructed Kelcey to “live a life worth writing about” and to stop worrying so much about always pleasing others. Kinsey fully believed, and encouraged Kelcey to believe, that while considering others matters, lives are meant to be lived by the people that they belong to—and not necessarily to please the people that they don’t. For Kelcey, who truly dislikes making decisions for fear of letting others down, this lesson has proven vital in making many difficult choices in her life.
In five years, Kelcey sees herself working in audience engagement or political reporting in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. That said, she is not looking for anything too permanent at the moment. “I want to be able to move around for the foreseeable future and not be too linked to one particular job or area,” said Caulder.
Audience engagement, Kelcey’s preferred job of choice for the next several years, is a relatively new addition to the journalism field. According to her, it is a very important and growing area that uses many of the skills students at Grady College develop through the New Media Institute. Likely tasks include working with reporters and sections to find opportunities to develop readership, usually by integrating social platforms into newsrooms and creating branded content for publications, particularly for live events.
In December, Kelcey will finally walk under the Arch as a fully-grown Bulldog and she couldn’t be more excited. While she is sad to know that Saturdays in Athens won’t ever be quite the same for her, she is looking forward to putting all of her hard work to use in the big city.